


Can We Pretend, Sweetly

by downjune



Series: I Love You More [3]
Category: Hockey RPF
Genre: F/M, Long-Distance Relationship, M/M, Multi, Polyamory, Polyamory Negotiations
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-09-06
Updated: 2017-09-06
Packaged: 2018-12-24 18:08:34
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,377
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12018231
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/downjune/pseuds/downjune
Summary: “Do you want to pretend I’m him?”Sid turned to look at her, but in the dark, her eyes were only shadows. “What do you mean?”





	Can We Pretend, Sweetly

**Author's Note:**

> My cup runneth over with Marc-Andre Fleury feelings. So have more of them. Here is the concluding part of this series I started...over a year ago? Best to read the first two parts before this one.

/I’ll carry on  
Counting my cards down to one/

Flower had been in Vegas two weeks when Vero climbed into Sid’s bed. He’d been thinking about jerking off when the covers lifted, a puff of cool air startled him, and there she was. He hadn’t had a girl in bed with him since…well, since he was a boy and the girl was a girl—not a 32-year-old woman. 

She scooted close to him so her knees poked his legs. Sid held very still—as if she could have made a mistake which bed she’d gotten into.

“Do you miss him?” she finally asked into the quiet of his room. His room in their Pittsburgh house, the girls asleep down the hall, for-sale sign in the front yard.

“Yeah,” Sid answered. _I feel like my insides are outside, on the ground_ , he meant. _Gutted._ That was the word.

“Do you want to pretend I’m him?”

Sid turned to look at her, but in the dark, her eyes were only shadows. “What do you mean?”

“We could try it. He wouldn’t mind. He’d like it, I think.”

“If we…”

“If we fucked.”

Swallowing down a strange giggle, Sid rolled to face her, and their knees nudged again. One year they’d been a family. A three-partner, three-parent unit. Sid-and-Flower, Flower-and-Vero, Vero-and-Sid. Flower-and-Vero-and-Sid and the girls. To date, Sid had helped with meal and bath times, washed dishes, and read books before bed. 

With Vero, he stayed up late, made popcorn, and listened to her stories about when she and Flower were kids. They napped together sometimes on the couch. They didn’t have sex.

“Well, I’m gay,” he said. “So, there’s that.” 

She pinched his side the way she pinched Flower’s. “We don’t have to fuck each other. Just get off, ourselves. And pretend he’s here.”

Sid tried to picture that—his hand on his dick, Flower above him and in him in his mind. With Flower…with Flower, he was full. He was a whole person, with romance, a sex life, and a best friend who knew how to make him laugh and make him feel so good, he cried sometimes. With Flower, wherever they were, they were home. 

They had been home. 

With Vero in this half-empty house, he was somewhere between limbo and hell. The thought of her beside him, pretending her husband was here, made him ill.

“I don’t think I want to do that,” he said carefully. “But you could stay for a while.”

She hmm’d quietly and laid her hand on his side, scooting a bit closer and wedging her knee between his legs. “How does he hold you?” she asked and slid her hand to the middle of his back. “Like this?”

Sid’s throat tightened, and he nodded. “How did you know?”

When she couldn’t pull him closer, she drew herself further in, and at her effort, Sid came out of his paralysis. He wrapped his arms around her on a long exhale. She was narrow and small against him. 

“Marc-Andre told me,” she said.

“Oh, right.” Of course. 

“He tells me how much he loves you—all the ways he loves you.” Her voice caught, and Sid’s chest tightened, too. “His heart is breaking.”

Sid closed his eyes, and anger flared, hot and quick and bitter on his tongue. He tried to keep it in and failed. “How can you say that to me?”

“Because he won’t. He won’t ever.”

“No, that’s not what I—” He took a sharp breath. “You’re leaving with him. You get to keep him. Your family will be together, and I’ll have nothing.” He bit his lips to stop the words from coming. And Vero was silent—she couldn’t deny it.

“I’ll be alone again,” he said. It was almost a moan, pathetic and awful. “But it’ll be worse this time because I’ll know exactly what I’m losing.” 

Vero shifted in his grip, away from him, and he released her. 

“I’m sorry,” he said quickly. “I’m sorry, but I hate this. I can’t stand it.”

Vero’s bare foot pushed against his shin as she sat up. “You’re not the only one who’s losing something,” she said finally.

He shook his head and sat up with her. It was all burning hot between his eyes, his throat, and his stomach, now. “You’re leaving with him. Whenever it happens, you’re still leaving. You could have sold the house over the summer, but you didn’t, because of me. You drew it out so I could get another summer with you, but you’re still leaving.” 

“He’s not,” she said, her voice tight and cold. “He’s leaving so much here. How much of his heart will stay with you? How much will be left for me?” Vero drew her knees up, pulling the blankets out of Sid’s lap so he shivered from the overhead fan. Anger and dread and heartsickness crawled along his skin and raised goosebumps at the hard edge of her voice. “What if he can’t love me anymore without you?”

He wanted to laugh in disbelief, but self-preservation kept that back. “There’s never been a moment he hasn’t loved you.”

“We’ve never been through this before,” she shot back. “Our whole lives, we’ve lived here and in Sorel. We’ve never done this.”

“You’re going to be fine,” Sid bit out, angry that he had to comfort her through his own pain. “Your family will be together.”

“It won’t.”

“Stop.” Sid barked an ugly laugh. “Please just stop.”

She looked accusingly at him. “You think I don’t mean it. You think we can just leave you. _Fuck_ you for that.” 

Sid blinked. This was a fight. He and Vero were fighting like there was something to lose or to save between them. It wasn’t an experience he’d ever had with a woman.

“You’ve been together since you were kids,” he said slowly, as if to one of the girls. “You’ve been with me a year. You’ll move away, and you’ll be fine.”

She hugged her knees like a kid, her shoulders hunched. Shaking her head, she rocked gently back on her tailbone, then forward again. “I can’t deal with this alone. You know what he’s like. He’ll bury everything behind a smile, and he won’t talk to me, and we’ll all be fucking miserable.”

“Vero, he tells you everything,” Sid reminded her. “You know—everything about us.” He never thought about her presence when he and Flower were alone together, but she might as well be there. She knew his ticklish spots. Flower had probably described to her the sounds Sid made when he swallowed around Sid’s dick. 

“Not this stuff. He hates this—he hates goodbyes.” She rubbed her elbow. “I convinced him to wait to sell the house here, so we would have more time.”

Sid’s stomach turned to lead, and his heart wanted to join it.

“He wanted a clean break,” she said quietly, her voice wobbling. “But that’s not possible. We’ve been here fourteen years.” She sniffed and rubbed the back of her hand against her nose.

Certain all the blood had drained from his face, Sid wanted to put his head between his knees. Flower had lain beside him on his couch and told him he was as serious as a heart attack. This wasn’t a passing thing. It wasn’t a pity fuck. It was love. Safety. Family.

And Vero’d had to convince him to put off selling the house three months. Their last three months together.

When she climbed into his lap and clung to him with her bony knees and arms, Sid didn’t hesitate to hold on tight this time. He matched his breathing to hers so maybe she wouldn’t notice his was just as messy. 

How could he have been so stupid? Married couples with kids didn’t take a third partner for good and for always. Not when that couple was Marc-Andre and Veronique. They were practically a law of nature.

Except, if he couldn’t trust Flower with his heart, who was there for him? Who would ever love him the way Flower had?

As if in answer to his question, Vero turned her head just enough that their mouths touched, an incidental brush of lips until Sid cupped his hand to the back of her head. She exhaled carefully through her nose and kissed him with just as much tenderness. Soft and dry except for the flicker of her tongue against his lip. Spreading his hand, he pressed up and down her spine to the curve of her hip. She made a quiet sound and squeezed tighter with her knees.

He hadn’t been with a girl since Junior, when nothing anybody did made any sense, and hormones could account for just about anything. The few men he’d been with in his life were quick and quiet sucks or handjobs—guys just as closeted and terrified of exposure as him. Sex had been something he took care of himself. Like nutrition or the foam roller on a tight muscle group. Maintenance without real pleasure. Necessary and sufficient. Until last year. When Sid figured out that sex could be _good_ with the right partner. And that it came with so much else besides. It came with a family.

He preferred men, and he found the idea of bisexuality stressful and exhausting, yet when Vero made that sound again and shifted against him, he wanted…he wanted more. Flower was gone, and Vero was going, but he could wrap himself in what was left now. She’d invited it. 

The thought had his hips hitching up against hers and his cock thickening. She felt it and stilled for a moment in his lap. 

“I’m…I’m on the pill,” she said, nervous in a way she hadn’t been since they’d started this last year. 

“I’ve only been with him,” Sid answered. 

“If I can’t trust Andre, what the fuck am I doing, right?” But she was already moving, tugging his boxers down and snapping the elastic behind his balls. He hissed, but she’d already pulled the crotch of her panties aside. She hesitated over him, the wet heat of her just out of reach. “Okay?”

Sid nodded and groaned as she sank down, warm and snug. She exhaled unsteadily and settled herself against him, and it was unlike any other time he’d been with a girl in the context of sex or sexual attraction. He didn’t have to play at flirting. Mimicking what his teammates did to fit in. Vero was warm and familiar in his arms, and okay, they were also having sex. He flexed his hips up, and she made that good noise again, her body clenching and responding, and it was _good_ to be with her like this, even if he couldn’t say that he’d ever wanted it before. This was good.

She clasped his shoulders and breathed against his neck, and they fucked because Marc-Andre was gone. They were here, and he was gone, so Sid buried himself in Vero, did what he knew how to do, and let her take care of the rest. 

Her fingers quick and her hips slow to rise and fall, she touched herself and fucked him at a pace he found difficult to follow, but all he had to do was hang on and not come too quickly. Which was actually not that difficult until she made the sound again only _louder_ and sharper, and the sudden shuddering clench of her body made him absolutely certain that he’d never gotten a girl off before this one. 

_Oh well_ , he thought. He’d rather be one-and-done with Vero than anybody else. Her cunt pulsed around him in a way that made the word _cunt_ kind of hot for the first time in his life, and when he remembered he was bare inside her, he went off harder than he ever had with a woman. Harder than unprotected sex should have gotten him off.

She was Flower’s, and he was Flower’s, but she was his, too. He was hers in a way he hadn’t seen until Flower was no longer between them. Until he was wrapped up and held in her.

He had the presence of mind to be jealous that her orgasm lasted way longer than his, until she went loose and boneless in his arms. Then, not wanting to let go yet, even though they were done, he held her tighter.

“Fuck,” she murmured, voice small. 

“Was that okay?” he asked stupidly, and grimaced. Was their weird grief-sex okay? What answer did he hope to get?

But she nodded, chin digging sharply into his shoulder. “Andre was right—your cock really is the perfect size.”

Sid snorted a laugh before he could stop himself, and he felt Vero press a smile against his neck. “What size is that?”

“Not too long and just fat enough.” With a sigh, she drew back and reached between her legs to touch herself again, but it was only to catch Sid’s come as it dripped out of her. Flushing bright red, he reached for the tissue box and handed it over. “Thank you,” she murmured, staring thoughtfully at her fingers for a moment before cleaning up. 

“I have to pee,” she said eventually, stripping the rest of the way out of her underwear as she walked to the bathroom, her bare ass just visible beneath her t-shirt. 

Unsure what to do, Sid tugged his underwear back up. This was his room, so he shouldn’t be the one to leave, but when she returned, she climbed back in with him. She slipped into her underwear beneath the covers and didn’t try to touch him. 

“He loves you so much,” she said to the ceiling. “And so do I.”

Sid closed his eyes. “I know.” _And it doesn’t matter_ , he didn’t say. 

“I’m sorry,” she said, like she’d heard.

“Me too.”

He drifted in and out of sleep with Vero’s breath soft and steady beside him. It was only when her breathing deepened to something like snores that he realized the light had changed and he’d slept through the night.

And that it wasn’t Vero snoring next to him, but Flower slumped against the bedroom wall, head and shoulder pillowed against his suitcase.

 

**Author's Note:**

> TMI perhaps, but I found it super satisfying in this part to explore love without sexual attraction as well as how sex might still come into it.


End file.
